flexible display

Yesterday at Lenovo's Tech World event, the company demoed two concept products that were, frankly, kind of amazing. A foldable tablet-phone, and a bendable wrist-phone. While the on-stage demo didn't really tell us much about them, I sat in on a talk where we were allowed to take a closer look (though not touch, sadly) at these concept devices while learning more about them though.

If you've seen photos from any technology trade show in the last decade, you've probably seen someone showing off a flexible screen. It makes for a nice demo, but a real product? According to Bloomberg, Samsung is planning to launch not one but two phones in 2017 with foldable screens.

The nice thing about a United States design patent, as opposed to a more common utility patent, is that it doesn't actually have to work. Hell, it doesn't even have to make sense - it just has to be a mostly-new idea that's concrete enough to put into a technical doodle. So it is with Design Patent D726,140, awarded to LG by the US Patent and Trademark Office last week. If you could turn one of those slap-bracelets from the 90s into a phone-watch hybrid, it would look a lot like this.

"FIG. 1 is a perspective view of a mobile phone showing our new design in which the display part has been bent and wound around the band"

The design patent covers a fairly standard (if impossibly thin) slate smartphone that curves backwards on the top and bottom.

If you've always wanted a phone with a big, curved screen, LG wants to grant your wish. To that end the company is now mass-producing flexible OLED screen panels, presumably for an upcoming device or class of devices. The screen itself (not the phone or tablet that it's going into) will be 6 inches diagonally, .44mm thin, and just 7.2 grams.

To achieve this feat of bendy engineering, LG swapped out a glass panel for flexible plastic, which allows for a concave radius of 700mm (a pretty extreme curve, even compared to the curved glass panels on the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus) and an "unbreakable" build.

We've heard quite a bit about Samsung's prototype flexible OLED display over the past couple of years, and it looks like the company is starting to mature the tech, as it showed off the most practical phone design we've seen yet.

Just to get this out of the way up front – this phone is not flexible. It's just using the flexible display inside of a rigid case, so it's no different than current phones in that respect. When it comes to specs, Samsung wouldn't give up details, only telling The Verge that it's "about 5-inches across" with a resolution of "about" 720p.